Random? Numbers (was:RE: Brand Loyalty (was Re: [MUD-Dev] Req uirements for MM(wasComplexities of MMOG Servers)))

[Freeman]

From: Daniel.Harman at barclayscapital.com

> This is completely tangential to your original point, but has
> anyone considered making a 'fun' random number generator. As a
> first cut, it might involve the following :
 
>   - Prevent long streaks of critical failures.
 
>   - Encourage streaks of critical success every so often (perhaps
>   when their hp are low etc.) e.g. 3 critical hits landing in a
>   row always feels good.
 
>   - Most of the time get results vaguely in the middle of the
>   range.

I considered doing something like this for Ackadia, but never got
around to it.  Basically I was just going to eliminate the streaks
of wins And the streaks of losses, so that overall there'd be no
difference, but so that it would "feel" more random to the players.

My thought was that even a really good random number generator
doesn't feel all that random, given my own tendency to forget lucky
streaks and just remember the time it took 40 tries to finally
succeed at something.

Now I think more significant issue there was the skill system which
decided if you had even 1% chance of success, to go ahead and let
you make the attempt, rather than just telling you, "You can't do
this."

The direction I wound up going with most skills was to put variable
delays based on your skill, so the player didn't see each and every
skillcheck roll: It's just that sometimes they could hide (or
whatever) really fast, and sometimes it took longer to hide.  For
example, the old system was:

  You look for ore
    You don't find any
  You look for ore
    You find some
  You look for ore
    You don't find any

And the new system looked more like:

  You look for ore
    (you're still looking)
  You find some
    (you keep looking)
  You find some more.

I do like your idea of a "fun number generator" for things like
to-hit rolls though, since the player sees every success and every
failure.

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